Jonathan Baumbach - You, or the Invention of Memory

“Who is this other woman?”

“You have no reason to feel jealous,” I say.

“So you say.”

By the time you are up and about, I am a step from going out the door, though I am not averse to being stopped.

“I’d appreciate if you didn’t leave like this,” you say in your most imperious voice. “We should discuss this, don’t you think?”

Momentum has its own logic. I am on the other side of your door, the door closed behind me, halfway down the first flight of stairs, a slow-motion replay of hasty retreat.

When I get to my place, which seems more than usually bleak, I can’t imagine what possessed me to walk out on you. There’s been no explicit agreement between us not to see other people.

And I’ve never been a jealous man as such.

I haven’t even removed my jacket and I am already conjecturing a return to the scene of the crime, playing out in the imagination the soap opera scenario of my reappearance at your door.

I have a tendency, as I don’t have to tell you, to visualize the consequences of an act in advance of risking it.

In one of my scenarios, the last in fact, the defining moment, if you will, a man answers my knock at the door. He is wearing one of those silky dressing gowns that gangsters and cads wore in old Hollywood movies.

If you call, which you don’t, and are persuasively apologetic, which you are not (and can’t be unless you call), it might make a decision to return less fraught with risk.

In the end, my decision not to return makes itself. I can’t go back, not tonight, without suffering serious loss of false pride.

I realize the position I allow myself has no flexibility, yet what else can I do?

I meet you for dinner the following Saturday at a place we’ve never gone before. We take turns apologizing for our behavior on the night of your disturbing confession and then you say that if I ask you to stop seeing Roger, if that’s what’s necessary to return things between us to the way they were, you will think about it.

Your offer surprises me — it was not one of my pre-dinner scenarios — so I have to listen to it echo in my head before coming to terms with it. “OK,” I say. “Yeah, sure.”

My hesitation seems to disturb you. “If we make such an agreement,” you say, “you’re going to have to stop dating other people. Are you sure that’s what you want?”

Although you are the only woman in my life at the moment, I balk momentarily at putting such an absolute restriction on my illusory freedom. Finally, I offer my hand to seal our bargain, which you accept with some hesitation of your own, giving it a parsimonious squeeze.

After dinner, we return to your apartment, which is in keeping with our usual routine, scrunch down on your familiar, not quite comfortable couch, and neck like teenagers in a car parked on a dark and silent street. Then instead of moving into the bedroom, closing the deal as it were, we get into talking in a less guarded way than usual and we both admit — you first — to distrusting somewhat the other’s ability to remain faithful.

“I want to trust you,” you say, “I really do, but I don’t know that I can, I really don’t. There’s this other woman in your life and there’s Roger in mine. I wonder if it’s such a good idea to stop seeing others — you know what I mean? — while there’s all this potential distrust between us.”

“Hey, it was your idea,” I say. “You said if I asked, you would stop seeing Roger.”

“As usual, you’re misquoting me,” you say. “What I said was, if you asked me to break with Roger, I would think about it, which is what I’ve been doing. I’m thinking why should I give up Roger if you continue to see whoever you’be been seeing. You haven’t even given me a name. Who is the woman you went to see last Saturday after you left my bed?”

“The name doesn’t matter,” I say, unwilling to acknowledge at this point that your rival is imaginary.

“I want a name,” you say. “I want everything out in the open between us or we have no deal.”

I put on my shirt and slide into my pants one leg at a time before I answer and even then, I hesitate, flirt with the idea of making up a name, which I reluctantly reject as a gesture of bad faith.

“Are you going to run out on me again?” you ask. “If you do that to me again …” You leave the threat implied.

And then (for no reason it seems to me — perhaps because I smile, or smirk as you say), you flail at me, hitting me repeatedly in the chest, the blows without much force though cumulative in their impact.

I have to grab your wrists to get you to stop, but that only seems to fuel your rage.

“Why won’t you tell me her name?” you whisper as though it were a scream. “Is she that important to you?”

“There is no name,” I say. “Think about it. A name will make this person who doesn’t matter to either of us memorable in a way that will make us both unhappy.”

“I am already unhappy with you,” you say.

We go on this way for a while, the stakes increasing as the argument deteriorates into pettiness, the realm of the unforgivable.

“I’m glad this has happened,” you say, meaning the opposite or at least something else altogether. “It has definitely shown me a side of you you’d kept hidden from me and for good reason. You always seemed kind to a fault, but that’s not who you really are, is it?”

Your verbal attacks, like your punches, make incremental inroads on my defenses. “Stop,” I say, wrapping my arms around you, an embrace you tolerate for the briefest moment before pushing me away.

“I feel oppressed by your presence,” you say, walking out of the room, throwing the remark back at me over your shoulder.

“What are you talking about?” I call back, not wanting the answer, on the edge of knowing it.

You don’t return right away, and, when you do, you seem surprised that I’m still on the scene. “I felt this before,” you say, “but I couldn’t define it exactly. You take up all the air in a room. You have an oppressive presence.”

I probably take your remark more literally than I should, but I don’t know what else to do with it. “I’m sorry,” I say, my regret unfocused.

You wave off my meaningless apology. “Being sorry doesn’t change anything. You are who you are.”

I resist the self-defeating impulse to defend myself and take a different tack equally humbling. “Just a few weeks ago” I say in a childish squall, “you said that you loved me.”

“Really, sweetheart,” you say. “One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”

I wait around in my most nonoppressive mode, waiting for you to recant your disaffection, but it doesn’t happen, hasn’t happened, has no chance of happening. I am stuck, irrevocably oppressive, oppressing myself and anyone else in the sway of my shadow.

My exit line is not worth thinking about, let alone repeating here.

A few days later, I receive a phone call from someone calling himself Roger as if the name is supposed to mean something to me, suggesting we meet for a drink the coming Thursday after work.

“I’m busy on Thursday,” I say. “Besides, if this is what I think it’s about, I don’t see the point.”

“No point, huh?”

“I think you know what I’m saying,” I say.

“Aren’t you even a little curious to hear what I have to say? Look it doesn’t have to be Thursday. You choose a time and a place and I’ll make it my business to be there.”

“What about Thursday at four?”

He makes an extended noise, somewhere between a laugh and a groan or some combination thereof. “It’s a little early in the day for me, but OK.”

“You sure it’s OK?” I say.